Best Password Managers of September 2026: 7 Compared on Price and Free Tiers

This page contains no paid placements. Vendor links below are ordinary links; we have not been approved by any password-manager affiliate program, so we earn nothing when you sign up. The one Amazon link, in the gear note near the end, may earn us a commission. See our affiliate disclosure.

By Lennit Herrera, founder and editor, Shielded Browsing  ·  Last updated September 28, 2026

The verdict: Bitwarden is the password manager most people should use in 2026. Its free plan stores unlimited passwords on unlimited devices, it is open source, and its Premium plan costs $19.80 a year, which is less than any other paid plan on this list at its regular price. If you want the most polished apps and are happy to pay for them, 1Password is the better experience at $47.88 a year ($35.88 in the first year for new customers who buy direct). Proton Pass is the privacy pick, with built-in hide-my-email aliases and a free plan almost as generous as Bitwarden’s. For a household, Bitwarden Families covers six people for $47.88 a year, the lowest regular price for a family plan here.

Every price, plan limit and free-tier detail below was read on each vendor’s own pricing page on September 28, 2026. Security claims come from the vendors’ published documentation, their listed third-party audits and US government guidance. We do not test password managers ourselves, and nothing on this page is a hands-on result.

On this page

• The short list: seven picks at a glance
• Comparison table: price, free tier, family plan
• How we picked
• 1. Bitwarden: best overall and best free plan
• 2. 1Password: best apps and best for new-to-this families
• 3. Proton Pass: best for privacy and email aliases
• 4. RoboForm: best for form-filling and a cheap paid plan
• 5. NordPass: best first-year deal
• 6. Keeper: best for government-grade certifications
• 7. Dashlane: best all-in-one bundle, if you’ll pay for it
• Who each one is right for
• Do you even need one? Apple Passwords and browser managers
• What “zero-knowledge” actually protects, and what it doesn’t
• First-year prices vs renewal prices
• Why LastPass isn’t on this list
• What else didn’t make the list
• What a password manager can’t do
• Frequently asked questions

The short list

• Bitwarden: best overall and best free plan. Unlimited passwords and devices for $0; Premium $19.80 a year.
• 1Password: best apps. No free plan; $47.88 a year regular, $35.88 first year for new direct customers.
• Proton Pass: best for privacy. Free plan with unlimited logins and 10 email aliases; Pass Plus $35.88 a year.
• RoboForm: best for filling long forms. Premium renews at $29.88 a year.
• NordPass: best first-year deal. Premium $23.88 for the first 12 months.
• Keeper: best for FIPS 140-3 validated encryption. $42.99 a year.
• Dashlane: best all-in-one bundle with a VPN. $5.42 a month billed annually; no free plan since 2025.

Comparison table

US-dollar prices from each vendor’s pricing page, September 28, 2026, before tax. Dashlane publishes monthly-equivalent figures only; the yearly amounts are that figure times twelve. Promotional prices change often; the renewal section explains which numbers are introductory.

How we picked

We compared ten password managers: the seven above, plus LastPass and the free managers built into Apple devices and Google Chrome, which we cover separately because they are not subscriptions. For each paid product we read the vendor’s own personal-plan pricing page on September 28, 2026, and noted the regular price, any first-year discount, what the free plan (if any) actually allows, and how many people a family plan covers. For security we relied on what each vendor documents publicly: its encryption scheme, whether its code is open source, the third-party audits and certifications it lists, and its incident history as the company itself disclosed it.

We weighted four things, in this order:

1. Security model and track record. Zero-knowledge encryption is table stakes; we looked for published audits and for how a company behaved after incidents.
2. Regular price, not promo price. You will pay the renewal price every year after the first, so that is the number the ranking uses.
3. Free-plan usefulness. A free plan that works on one device is a trial with no end date; one that syncs everywhere is a real product.
4. Household value. Cost per person on the family plan, and how many people it covers.

We do not test password managers ourselves. We did not measure autofill accuracy, app speed or import reliability, and you will not find those claims below. Where a feature appears, it is because the vendor lists it on its own pricing or documentation page. We have not been accepted into any password-manager affiliate program, so none of these rankings is influenced by commission; every vendor link on this page is an ordinary link.

1. Bitwarden: best overall and best free plan

Starting price: $19.80/year (Premium)  ·  Free tier: unlimited passwords, unlimited devices  ·  Platforms: browser, mobile and desktop apps, plus self-hosting  ·  Notable limit: free-plan sharing is with one other person only

Why Bitwarden?

Bitwarden is the only manager here where the free plan is the whole product rather than a demo of it. Its pricing page describes the free tier as “unlimited devices, unlimited passwords” across browser, mobile and desktop apps, with passkey storage, a password and username generator, email-alias integration, encrypted export, Bitwarden Send and free sharing with one other user. Premium, at $1.65 a month billed as $19.80 a year, adds the integrated authenticator for six-digit two-factor codes, 5 GB of encrypted file attachments, emergency access, vault health reports and priority support. The detail that sets it apart from every other pick is transparency: the code is open source, and Bitwarden’s compliance page lists nine separate third-party security assessments dated 2025 alone, covering the browser extension, core application, desktop app, mobile apps, web vault, network and cryptography, alongside SOC 2 Type 2 and SOC 3 reports. Nobody else on this list publishes that much.

What we like

• The best free plan in the category: no password cap, no device cap, sync included.
• The cheapest paid plan here at its regular price, $19.80 a year, with no first-year trick.
• Open source, with a long public list of dated third-party assessments.
• Families covers six people for $47.88 a year, with unlimited sharing and collections.

Watch out for

• Many older reviews still quote Premium at $10 a year. It is $19.80 now; budget for that.
• Free-plan sharing is limited to one other person through a free organization; sharing with a whole household needs Families.
• The two-factor code generator is Premium-only, so free users who want codes and passwords in one app will need to pay or use a separate authenticator.

Best for: almost everyone, and anyone who wants a real password manager for $0.  Skip it if: you have tried it and simply prefer a more polished app, in which case 1Password is the upgrade.

Start with Bitwarden Free →  ·  Read our Bitwarden vs 1Password comparison →

2. 1Password: best apps and best for new-to-this families

Starting price: $47.88/year ($35.88 first year, new direct customers)  ·  Free tier: none, 14-day trial  ·  Platforms: macOS, iOS, watchOS, Windows, Android, Linux; Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, Brave  ·  Notable limit: promo pricing is not available through app stores

Why 1Password?

1Password’s distinctive idea is the Secret Key. Per its support documentation, the Secret Key is “34 letters and numbers, separated by dashes”, stored on the devices you sign in on and in your Emergency Kit, and never sent to 1Password. It adds 128 bits of entropy to your account password, which 1Password estimates averages about 40 bits on its own, so someone who stole 1Password’s server data could not brute-force a vault without also having the key. That matters because it protects people who picked a mediocre master password, which is most people. On price, the personal pricing page lists Individual at $3.99 a month and Families at $5.99 a month, both paid annually, with a first-year promotion of $2.99 and $4.49 for new customers who buy directly. Families includes five seats, unlimited shared vaults and admin controls.

What we like

• The Secret Key design protects weak master passwords against a server-side breach.
• A broad native platform list, including Linux and watchOS, plus every major browser.
• Families has simple admin controls, which suits a household where one person manages the accounts.

Watch out for

• No free plan at all; after the 14-day trial you pay or leave.
• The first-year discount is direct-only; 1Password says promotions are not available through Google Play, the Apple App Store or other app stores. Year two is $47.88 (Individual) or $71.88 (Families).
• The Secret Key is also a recovery risk: lose every signed-in device and your Emergency Kit, and you cannot get in.

Best for: people who value polished apps, and families where a less technical member needs the smoothest possible experience.  Skip it if: price is the deciding factor; Bitwarden does the core job for $28 a year less.

Try 1Password free for 14 days →  ·  Read our Bitwarden vs 1Password comparison →

3. Proton Pass: best for privacy and email aliases

Starting price: $35.88/year (Pass Plus, $4.99 month to month)  ·  Free tier: unlimited logins and devices, 10 hide-my-email aliases  ·  Platforms: browser, mobile and desktop apps  ·  Notable limit: the built-in 2FA authenticator is paid-only

Why Proton Pass?

Proton Pass is built by Proton, the Swiss company behind Proton Mail and Proton VPN, and it treats your email address as something to protect along with your passwords. Every paid plan includes unlimited hide-my-email aliases: when you sign up for a site, Pass can generate a forwarding address, so a breach or a spam list only ever gets the alias, which you can switch off. The free plan gets ten of them, plus unlimited logins, notes and cards on unlimited devices, password-health alerts and passkey support, per Proton’s pricing page. Pass Plus, billed at $35.88 every 12 months, adds unlimited aliases, the built-in authenticator, vault sharing, dark-web monitoring, file attachments and emergency access. Proton’s security page says all Pass apps are open source, that data is encrypted with 256-bit AES-GCM, and that Pass has been audited by independent third parties with the reports public.

What we like

• Built-in email aliases, which no other pick here includes as standard.
• A free plan that syncs across unlimited devices, second only to Bitwarden’s.
• Open-source apps and Swiss jurisdiction, for readers who weigh where a company is based.
• Proton Unlimited ($119.88 a year) bundles Pass with Mail, Calendar, Drive and VPN.

Watch out for

• The free plan is capped at 10 aliases and 2 vaults; older reviews (including an earlier version of this page) said unlimited aliases on free, which is no longer true.
• Pass Plus costs $16 a year more than Bitwarden Premium for the core password features; you are paying for the aliases.
• Proton’s discounts are shown against the monthly price, so the “40% off” label is the annual-plan saving, not a limited-time deal.

Best for: privacy-minded readers who want fewer places holding their real email address, and existing Proton users.  Skip it if: you don’t care about aliases; Bitwarden is cheaper for the same core job.

Start with Proton Pass Free →  ·  Read our Proton VPN review →

4. RoboForm: best for form-filling and a cheap paid plan

Starting price: $29.88/year at renewal ($2.49/month billed annually)  ·  Free tier: unlimited passwords on a single device  ·  Platforms: multi-platform apps, web access, Windows application logins  ·  Notable limit: free plan does not sync between devices

Why RoboForm?

RoboForm started as a form filler and still leans into it: its pricing page lists web-form filling, bookmarks, Safenotes and Windows application logins as features of every account, which makes it the pick for people who fill in long checkout, government or insurance forms more often than they log in. It is also cheap. Premium renews at $29.88 a year and Family, for up to five Premium accounts, at $47.75 a year. The page advertises a lower first-year price for new users, but that figure did not render in the copy we read, so we cannot quote it. RoboForm also lists a local-only mode, where your data and backups stay on your device and are not synced to its servers, for people who would rather not keep a vault in anyone’s cloud. Its security page describes AES-256 encryption with PBKDF2-SHA256 key derivation and a zero-knowledge design.

What we like

• Form filling and Windows application logins, which most rivals don’t advertise.
• Family covers five people at $47.75 a year, close to Bitwarden’s price.
• A local-only mode for people who don’t want cloud sync.

Watch out for

• The free plan works on one device only, so it is not a real alternative to Bitwarden Free.
• The first-year sale price was not readable on the pricing page when we checked; confirm what you’ll be charged at checkout, and note that $29.88 is what it renews at.
• Closed source; you rely on RoboForm’s own description of its security and audits.

Best for: heavy form-fillers and Windows users who want app logins handled too.  Skip it if: you need a free plan that syncs, or you want open-source code.

See RoboForm plans →

5. NordPass: best first-year deal

Starting price: $23.88 for the first 12 months ($35.88 shown struck through)  ·  Free tier: yes, one user, no multi-device access  ·  Platforms: browser, mobile and desktop apps  ·  Notable limit: the headline price is introductory

Why NordPass?

NordPass comes from Nord Security, the company behind NordVPN, and its selling point is price in year one. Its plans page shows Premium at $1.99 a month, $23.88 for the first 12 months, against a struck-through $35.88; the two-year plan is $37.53 for the first 27 months. Family covers six user accounts for $44.28 for the first 12 months against $71.88 struck through. On the technical side, NordPass encrypts vaults with XChaCha20 rather than the AES-256 most rivals use. NordPass argues AES shows “early signs” of potential future weakness; that is its own framing, and both ciphers are considered secure today, so we would not choose a manager on the cipher alone. Premium adds multi-device access, password sharing, Password Health and a Data Breach Scanner, per the plan table.

What we like

• The cheapest first year for a paid plan here, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
• Family covers six accounts, matching Bitwarden and Proton.
• A sensible pick if you already pay for NordVPN and want one account for both.

Watch out for

• The free plan does not include access on multiple devices, per NordPass’s own plan table, so it is not a practical everyday option.
• Discount terms and conditions apply; the struck-through $35.88 and $71.88 figures are the list prices, and the page does not state the renewal price in plain words next to the offer. Check before year two.
• Closed source.

Best for: NordVPN customers and anyone who wants a cheap first year to try a paid manager.  Skip it if: you want the lowest long-run cost, which is Bitwarden.

See NordPass plans →  ·  Read our NordVPN review →

6. Keeper: best for government-grade certifications

Starting price: $42.99/year (Keeper Unlimited)  ·  Free tier: none, 30-day free trial  ·  Platforms: apps, web app and browser extensions  ·  Notable limit: dark-web monitoring is a paid add-on

Why Keeper?

Keeper is mostly a business and government vendor, and its personal plans inherit that paperwork. Its security page says it uses FIPS 140-3 validated encryption modules certified through NIST’s Cryptographic Module Validation Program, holds SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications, and runs a FedRAMP High environment for government customers. No other consumer manager here makes that list of claims, which is why it is the pick for people who work in regulated fields and want the same product at home. The personal pricing page lists Keeper Unlimited at $42.99 a year and Family at $91.99 a year for five private vaults with 10 GB of secure file storage and emergency access. BreachWatch dark-web monitoring is an add-on, listed at $26.99 a year.

What we like

• FIPS 140-3 validated encryption and a long certification list, documented on its own site.
• Family includes 10 GB of secure file storage at no extra cost.
• Emergency access for estate planning on both personal plans.

Watch out for

• No free plan; only a 30-day trial.
• Breach monitoring costs extra ($26.99 a year), when Bitwarden, Proton and NordPass include some form of it in their paid tiers.
• Family at $91.99 is the second-priciest household plan here, behind only Dashlane’s.

Best for: people who want a certified, enterprise-grade vendor for personal use.  Skip it if: you’re price-sensitive; the certifications don’t change what most households need.

Try Keeper free for 30 days →

7. Dashlane: best all-in-one bundle, if you’ll pay for it

Starting price: $5.42/month billed annually (about $65/year)  ·  Free tier: none since September 16, 2025; 14-day trial  ·  Platforms: apps and browser extensions, unlimited devices  ·  Notable limit: family members don’t get the VPN

Why Dashlane?

Dashlane is the most expensive manager on this list, and it justifies that with extras. Its personal pricing page lists Premium at $5.42 a month billed annually with dark-web monitoring, a VPN for public Wi-Fi, real-time phishing alerts, AI-powered scam protection and 1 GB of encrypted document storage. Friends & Family is $8.13 a month billed annually for 10 members, the largest household cap here; the plan manager gets full Premium, and members get “everything but VPN”. The thing to know before you sign up is that Dashlane ended its free plan on September 16, 2025. Former free users lost the ability to view or edit their data on that date and were given until September 16, 2026 to upgrade or export. That deadline has now passed, so anyone who left an old free Dashlane vault untouched should not count on it still being there.

What we like

• The largest family plan here: 10 members on one subscription.
• Phishing alerts and scam protection built in, rather than sold as add-ons.
• A VPN included, if you don’t already pay for one.

Watch out for

• The highest individual price on this list, over three times Bitwarden Premium.
• No free plan any more, and a recent history of withdrawing one; weigh that if you want a free option that will still exist in five years.
• A VPN bundled into a password manager is a convenience, not a replacement for a dedicated one; see our VPN comparison if privacy is the goal.

Best for: large households and people who want passwords, alerts and a VPN on one bill.  Skip it if: you already pay for a VPN, or price matters.

Try Dashlane free for 14 days →

Who each one is right for

• You want a good password manager for $0: Bitwarden Free. Proton Pass Free is the runner-up if you want a few email aliases too. Neither caps devices.
• You’ll pay, but want the lowest long-run cost: Bitwarden Premium at $19.80 a year. RoboForm Premium ($29.88 renewal) is next.
• You want the nicest apps and don’t mind paying: 1Password.
• You’re setting up a family of up to six: Bitwarden Families at $47.88 a year is the lowest regular price. RoboForm Family ($47.75, five people) is essentially tied. See our family password manager guide for a closer look at sharing and recovery.
• Your household is bigger than six: Dashlane Friends & Family covers ten.
• You want to stop giving sites your real email: Proton Pass.
• You fill in a lot of long forms, or want Windows app logins: RoboForm.
• You work in a regulated industry and want the certifications: Keeper.
• You already pay for NordVPN: NordPass, for the ecosystem and the first-year price.
• You only use Apple devices and never share with anyone on Android or Windows: Apple’s free Passwords app may be enough; see the next section.

Do you even need one? Apple Passwords and browser managers

The honest answer for some readers is no, not a paid one. Since iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia, Apple has shipped a standalone Passwords app that, per Apple’s support page, stores passwords, passkeys, Wi-Fi passwords and verification codes, generates strong passwords, alerts you to passwords “that might not be secure”, syncs through iCloud Keychain, and lets you share credentials with friends and family. It costs nothing, and for a household that is all-Apple it covers the basics well.

Where built-in managers fall short is at the edges. Apple’s lives inside Apple’s ecosystem, so the moment one family member uses an Android phone or a Windows laptop at work, you are juggling two systems. Browser-based managers such as Chrome’s tie your vault to one browser and one account. Emergency access, which lets a trusted person request your vault if something happens to you, is a documented feature of Bitwarden Premium, Proton Pass Plus, Keeper and RoboForm; check whether your built-in manager has an equivalent before relying on it. If your life is split across platforms, or you want someone to be able to reach your accounts if something happens to you, a dedicated manager is worth it, and Bitwarden makes that cost $0.

What matters more than which one you pick is that you use one. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s guidance on strong passwords is to “create long, random, unique passwords with a password manager”, and it calls a password manager “one of the easiest ways to protect ourselves” from account takeover. A different password for every site is the whole point; a manager just makes that bearable.

What “zero-knowledge” actually protects, and what it doesn’t

Every manager on this list describes itself as zero-knowledge or end-to-end encrypted. In plain terms, your vault is encrypted on your own device with a key derived from your master password before it is sent to the company’s servers, so the company stores a locked box it cannot open. RoboForm, for example, describes AES-256 encryption with PBKDF2-SHA256 key derivation; Proton Pass uses 256-bit AES-GCM; NordPass uses XChaCha20. The cipher names differ, but the model is the same.

That model protects you against one specific and important thing: a breach of the vendor’s servers. If an attacker copies the encrypted vaults, they still have to guess each user’s master password to open one. Three things decide how well that holds up:

1. Your master password. A long, unique passphrase makes a stolen vault practically useless. A short or reused one does not. 1Password’s Secret Key exists precisely to make this less dependent on you, by mixing a 128-bit random key into the encryption.
2. What the vendor leaves unencrypted. Zero-knowledge covers the fields the vendor chooses to encrypt. The LastPass incident is the cautionary example: website URLs in its vault backups were not encrypted.
3. Your devices. Zero-knowledge does nothing if malware on your own computer reads the vault after you unlock it. A password manager is not an antivirus; see our antivirus guide for that layer.

Open source helps with the second point, because outsiders can check what is and is not encrypted. That is part of why Bitwarden and Proton Pass rank highly here: you do not have to take their word for it.

First-year prices vs renewal prices

Password-manager pricing pages are full of introductory offers, and the gap between year one and year two is large enough to change the ranking. Here is what the pages said on September 28, 2026:

• Bitwarden: no introductory price. $19.80 and $47.88 are the prices.
• 1Password: $35.88 then $47.88 (Individual); $53.88 then $71.88 (Families). New customers buying direct only.
• Proton Pass: the annual plan is shown as a discount against the $4.99 monthly price; $35.88 billed every 12 months.
• RoboForm: a first-year sale for new users, then $29.88 (Premium) and $47.75 (Family).
• NordPass: $23.88 and $44.28 “for the first 12 months”, against struck-through $35.88 and $71.88.
• Keeper: $42.99 and $91.99 billed annually; no introductory discount shown.
• Dashlane: $5.42 and $8.13 a month billed annually; no introductory discount shown on the page we read.

Two practical tips. First, put the renewal date in your calendar the day you subscribe, so the price rise is a decision rather than a surprise. Second, switching is less painful than it looks: most dedicated managers can import a CSV export from a rival, so moving at renewal time is a realistic option. Delete the exported CSV file afterwards; it is every password you own in plain text.

Why LastPass isn’t on this list

LastPass was once the default recommendation. We leave it out because of how its 2022 incident unfolded. In its own incident notice, first posted August 25, 2022 and updated on December 22, 2022, LastPass said an attacker had copied backups of customer vault data. The sensitive fields, including usernames, passwords, secure notes and form-fill data, were encrypted with 256-bit AES and could only be opened with each user’s master password. But website URLs were stored unencrypted, and the attacker also took account details including names, billing addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and IP addresses.

The practical consequence is that the attacker holds an encrypted copy of those vaults forever, along with a list of which sites each user had accounts on, which tells them whose vault is worth attacking. Anyone who had a weak master password at the time should treat every password in that vault as exposed. If you still use LastPass, or used it in 2022, change the passwords for your important accounts, starting with email and banking, after you move to a new manager. Changing only your LastPass master password now does nothing for the copy the attacker already has.

What else didn’t make the list

• Google Password Manager and other browser-built-in managers. Free and convenient, but tied to one browser or account, with the same cross-platform limits as Apple’s app. Fine as a starting point; not our recommendation for a mixed household.
• Apple Passwords. A genuinely good free option for all-Apple users, covered above. Left off the ranked list because it is not a product you choose independently of your devices.
• Offline, self-managed vault apps. Open-source apps that keep an encrypted vault file you sync yourself suit technical users, but they put backups and syncing on you. Bitwarden’s self-hosting option covers most of the same need with less risk of losing everything.
• Bundled managers from antivirus and identity-theft suites. We did not verify their standalone pricing this month; we’d rather leave them out than guess.

What a password manager can’t do

A password manager solves password reuse, which is the single biggest reason one breach turns into many. It does not solve everything:

• It won’t stop you typing a code into a phishing page. Autofill refusing to fill a lookalike site is a useful warning, but people override it. For your most important accounts, add a passkey or a hardware security key; our security key guide explains which to buy.
• It won’t protect a compromised device. If malware is on the machine, it can read what you unlock.
• It won’t remove your data from the brokers that already have it. Your address, phone number and relatives are on people-search sites regardless of your passwords; that is a separate job, covered in our data removal services comparison.
• It can’t recover a master password it never knew. Set up emergency access or account recovery where your manager offers it, and write your master password somewhere physically safe.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best free password manager in 2026?

Bitwarden. Its free plan stores unlimited passwords on unlimited devices with sync, per its pricing page on September 28, 2026. Proton Pass Free is the runner-up, with unlimited logins and devices plus 10 email aliases. RoboForm’s and NordPass’s free plans don’t give you everyday use across several devices, and Dashlane, 1Password and Keeper have no free plan.

How much does Bitwarden Premium cost now?

$19.80 a year ($1.65 a month billed annually). Many reviews, including an earlier version of this page, still say $10; that price is out of date. Bitwarden Families is $47.88 a year for six people.

Is 1Password worth paying for over Bitwarden?

Only if you value the apps and the Secret Key design enough to pay $28 a year more at regular prices ($47.88 vs $19.80). Both are zero-knowledge and both publish third-party audits. Our Bitwarden vs 1Password comparison goes feature by feature.

Which password manager is best for a family?

On price, Bitwarden Families: $47.88 a year for six people. For the simplest setup for less technical relatives, 1Password Families ($71.88 a year for five after the first year). For more than six people, Dashlane Friends & Family covers ten. Our family password manager guide compares them in more depth.

Does Dashlane still have a free plan?

No. Dashlane ended its free plan on September 16, 2025, and gave former free users until September 16, 2026 to export their data or upgrade. It now offers a 14-day trial of Premium.

Is it safe to keep all my passwords in one place?

For almost everyone it is far safer than the alternative, which in practice is reusing a few passwords. CISA recommends using a password manager for exactly this reason. Protect the vault with a long, unique master password and two-factor authentication, ideally a hardware key.

Should I still use LastPass?

We don’t recommend it. LastPass’s own December 2022 update said attackers copied vault backups in which website URLs were unencrypted. If you used LastPass then, move to another manager and change your important passwords, not just your master password.

Are Apple’s Passwords app or Google’s password manager good enough?

If every device in your life is Apple and you don’t need emergency access, Apple’s free Passwords app is a reasonable choice. Once you mix platforms, or want a trusted person to be able to reach your accounts in an emergency, a dedicated cross-platform manager is better, and Bitwarden’s free plan costs nothing.

Bottom line

Use Bitwarden. The free plan is a complete password manager, Premium is $19.80 a year, and it publishes more third-party security work than anyone else on this list. Pay for 1Password if you want the most polished apps, choose Proton Pass if keeping your real email address private matters to you, and ignore first-year prices when you compare, because the renewal price is what you’ll pay for years. Whichever you choose, the biggest security gain comes on the day you stop reusing passwords.

Pair it with a security key. A password manager handles unique passwords; a hardware key stops phishing on the accounts that matter most. The YubiKey 5C NFC works with Bitwarden, 1Password and most of the managers above. Not sure which key? See our hardware security key comparison. As an Amazon Associate we may earn from qualifying purchases.

About the author

Lennit Herrera is the founder and editor of Shielded Browsing, and compares VPNs, password managers and security hardware against the vendors’ own published pricing and documentation, independent security audits and government guidance rather than marketing claims. Shielded Browsing does not accept payment for placement and does not run hands-on product tests. Every price on this page was checked on the vendor’s own site on the date shown under the byline. More about this site →

Related reads

• Bitwarden vs 1Password: Which Password Manager Wins?
• Best Family Password Manager: Plans Compared for Real Households
• Best Hardware Security Keys of September 2026
• Best Data Removal Services of September 2026
• How to Stay Anonymous Online: A Practical Guide
• How to Secure Your Home Network